Chapter One

“What do you know about art, Volk?”

Maxim Abdullaev hurls the question through the airwaves as if it were an ax, cleaving pretense.

I cram my Nokia cell phone against my ear. Clattering dishes, jostling diners, and raised voices give me an excuse to delay answering his question. “Hold on,” I say, then step downstairs to my table in the basement of Vadim’s Café near Staraya Street, where I make my office.

Maxim could be anywhere. His headquarters are in the Solsnetskaya neighborhood just a few blocks away, but he changes his personal place of business weekly, sometimes daily, so it is impossible to develop a mental picture of where he is or what he is doing.

Once I’ve moved away from the din, I take a moment to gather my thoughts. “Art? I have a master’s in art history from Moscow University.”

I’m sure that Maxim knows enough about my life to catch the sarcasm. Dead mother, disappeared father, late-era Soviet poverty, and five years of killing and worse in Chechnya unsurprisingly failed to harmonize into a world-class education. The things I have learned are not taught in universities. He barks a deep-throated chuckle that offers no comfort. A polar bear probably makes the same sound just before it eats.

“Listen,” he says. “You do something for me. Talk to Gromov. Yes?”

“Yes,” I say, as if I have a choice, and Maxim disconnects.

Two hours later, nearing midnight, Gromov clumps like a plow horse into my basement office. The flesh on his bald head and puffy face droops like a shar-pei’s skin and slits his eyes, which are shifty-nervous, with good cause. Valya lurks hidden among the shelves of café sundries behind him.

“You talked to Maxim?” he says.

I grunt acknowledgment.

He collapses into a padded roller chair that disappears, creaking, beneath his bulk. Even its silvery round feet are covered by the hanging folds of his overcoat, where one hand stays buried in a deep pocket. He likes to show off a chromed Colt .45 Peacemaker, an outdated cannon that rends great holes in bodies, a good weapon for a man whose business is intimidation.

“I got a business opportunity,” he begins. “Maxim says you’re the guy to help me assess it.”

“I don’t do partners.”

He knows this. My rule is one source of the friction between us. “Yeah, yeah.” Scarred leather biker boots twirl the chair as he takes in the surroundings.

There’s not much to see here in the basement level. Black slate floor, rows of shelves, exposed raw-wood beams, plaster walls randomly damaged to show the red brick beneath, and dusty ’60s-era slot machines. Gromov is looking for Valya, I know, but she won’t be seen unless she wants to be. He finishes his survey and grins through crooked yellow teeth ridged black with omnipresent chewing tobacco.
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The following is an excerpt from the book The Peebles Principles
by R. Donahue Peebles with J.P. Faber
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; April 2007;$24.95US/ 29.99CAN; 978-0-470-09930-8
Copyright © 2007 R. Donahue Peebles

Prologue

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I came from what most people would describe as a middle class home, an only child in a one-parent household. But by the time I was twenty-seven I was a multimillionaire, and by the time I was forty-five I was worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

This book is the story of how I created that wealth, beginning with nothing. It is also a book about how to get rich, following the principles I learned over more than two decades of building my personal fortune. It is the breakdown of the deals that created that fortune and how I won those deals. It is a handbook of tales and tactics for a twenty-first-century entrepreneur.

Perhaps not everybody wants to get rich, but I would say that this particular desire is somewhere close to the core of the American dream. I know that I wanted to be rich when I was young. I wanted to achieve a financial stability that would free me from the worries over money that I experienced growing up. I wanted to leave that field of gravity forever.

My dream came true with my first big deal, when I was twenty-seven, which turned me into a multimillionaire. I have since consummated deals that dwarf my first win, but I have never had that same feeling.

I remember that day vividly, when I signed a letter of intent with the city of Washington, DC, to develop an office building on Martin Luther King Avenue. The bricks and mortar were still to come, but that document meant I would own half of a multimillion-dollar project and would be receiving a mid-six-figure income annually for decades to come.

When I returned to my apartment, at about 8 o’clock, a group of my friends were there. To celebrate, my girlfriend had gotten a cake from the Watergate Bakery, a white chocolate mousse cake, and a few bottles of champagne. It was a moment worthy of celebration, a breakthrough moment, the biggest event of my business career to date. It meant that my financial future was set from that moment on. I could quit right there if I wanted to; making a half million a year was more than I’d ever envisioned as a kid, when I was a teenager living with my mother and helping her make ends meet.

That night, lying in bed, I thought about it all. I thought back to how I was so impressed in high school when I learned that Walt Frazier was making $300,000 a year playing basketball. I’d wished that one day I could do that, and here I was, on my way to making more than that. It was just such a sense of relief. I was done. I didn’t have to do another thing except make sure the construction company actually built the building. What a great moment.
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The following is an excerpt from the book What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
by Dr. Laura Nathanson
Published by Collins; May 2007;$15.95US/$19.95CAN; 978-0-06-114582-7
Copyright © 2007 Laura Nathanson

Red Flags in Radiology Reports:
An Added Crucial Step

The only radiologist who double-checks a radiology report is the radiologist who wrote it. There is nobody in charge of reviewing reports for completeness, much less for accuracy and clarity of expression. One exception: there are institutions that have installed special software with templates that require the radiologist to fill in every item recommended by the guidelines of the American College of Radiology. If one stays blank, the report can’t be signed out or billed for.

But, you might say, the clinical physician who ordered the report and receives the interpretation must review it for clarity and completeness. Right? Isn’t there a double-check on the report?

Alas, nobody checks that the clinical physician actually does read the report. Every time there is a communication between doctor and doctor, about anything, there is a new opportunity for error. So you, Vigilant One, need to keep a special eye on data reports of all kinds, including radiology reports. Here’s how:

First, once again, you preshrink the report:

* Substitute every medical jargon word with “thing,” “thingy,” etc.
* Search for scary words and uncertain terms.
* See if there is a scary diagnosis that has not been excluded.
* Look for any signs of fuzzy logic.

Then — and this is new — you go on to an additional set of red flags reserved for data reports.

First, the clinical physician has ordered a study to answer a specific question: What’s that metallic thing up the kid’s nose? Is this wrist fractured? Does this woman have pneumonia? A red flag is indicated by a report’s failure to include any of the following:

* The data doctor must make clear that he understands the question — the reason for the test.
* The data doctor must describe his findings clearly enough so that the clinical physician can judge the reasonableness of the data doctor’s diagnosis.
* The data doctor also ought to give either a specific diagnosis (”Mason lapel pin high in left nostril”) or a differential diagnosis (”Foreign body, metallic, high in left nostril? Barbie slipper charm? earring? part of dog collar?”)
* Finally, if the data doctor feels it is appropriate, he should suggest further study or action. (”Recommend prompt removal of foreign body in nose due to danger of aspiration during sniffing.”)

The clinical physician and data doctor should be engaged in an active written dialogue where each listens to and queries the other with attention and respect. This means that the clinical physician should review each data report critically to make sure that the most important question has been understood and answered.

The second step in checking a data report is to make sure that its import actually got through to the clinical physician. If a serious error or omission in such a report goes unnoticed by the clinical physician, there can be dire results.
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By Timothy Hallinan
Author of A Nail Through the Heart: A Novel

“Everything happens somewhere”
– Pieter Haag

Where does your book take place?

Of course, on one level, it takes place in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of your characters. On another level, it might take place in Omaha. Or Venus.

Nicolson Baker once set an entire novel (I think) on an office-building escalator. All the action in one of Don DeLillo’s novels takes place in the back seat of a limousine going cross-town in New York, a journey that (as I know from personal experience) can seem to take a lifetime. A writer like Robert Ludlum might take you to twenty locations in eighteen pages.

Setting is, of course, the physical universe in which your story is set. But I’d suggest that it’s much more than that. It’s a reflection of the characters. It acts on the characters. It provides an almost inexhaustible source of details that can help you tell your story more vividly or give you an entirely new set of ideas. In a sense, it’s a character in itself. And, generally speaking, books in which the setting is skillfully presented are better books because of it.

Some writers are indelibly associated with certain settings. Larry McMurtry’s west is an enormous and open land to which some characters bring small, closed minds. Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles is sunny and hospitable on the surface and corrupt underneath. These dark depths are the natural habitats of his characters.

You’ve probably read novels in which the settings are nothing but brand names: Riding uptown in the Lincoln town car, Dolores passed Tiffany and Prada and the magical toy emporium of FAO Schwartz. Modestly interesting, I suppose, but it would be a lot more interesting if it had something to do with Dolores.

Now suppose we read instead, Riding uptown in the Lincoln town car, Dolores allowed the smooth leather of the seat to calm her. She checked her fingernails as they passed the glittering art deco spire of the Chrysler building but sat forward as Tiffany, Prada, and FAO Schwartz slid by.

Okay, now we’ve done three things at once: we’ve seen a little of New York, we’ve learned a little about Dolores, and we still got all those brand names. In the first example, the setting was passive; it was just scenery. In the second, it was active; it wasn’t just New York, it was Dolores’s New York.

If you want to finish your book, you need to know your setting as well as you know your characters. Believe me, the setting can bail you out when you’re stuck. It can present a new course of action. It can give you the word picture you need for a fresh approach to open a scene or a chapter. It can capture the reader’s imagination.

So I’d suggest exploring your setting in the same way you explore your basic idea and your characters.

I would hope that your setting has the following characteristics.

• It’s a place that interests you. You’re going to be spending a lot of time there.
• It’s a place you know a good deal about, or can discover a good deal about.
• It’s a place that’s interesting to readers, or one that you can make interesting to readers.
• If it’s an imaginary setting — Venus, for example, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, it’s a place you have done a lot of thinking about. You know its geography, its inhabitants, and its rules (moral and, if necessary, physical).

I love and am fascinated with both Los Angeles and Bangkok. I’ve spent substantial amount of time exploring them both. I could probably write a pretty bad city guide to both or either of them. That makes it fun for me to write about them, and there are times during the writing of any novel when having fun can be the only satisfaction available.

You may feel equally at home, creatively speaking, with Winesburg, Ohio, or 18th-century Paris, or a twentieth-century high-rise, or the inside of a maximum-security prison. Whatever your setting may be, I’d hope you’ll work to make it active rather than passive. It will be presented from your characters’ perspectives, whenever that’s appropriate. It will play a role in the story. It will affect your characters. In some ways it will reflect them.

It may help to think about the theater when considering setting. Theater directors take setting extremely seriously. It might be a bare stage that takes us directly into the minds of the characters or an extravaganza of elaborate sets that provides a social, intellectual, and emotional context for the story. What it never is, at least not in a good production, is a series of pretty pictures in front of which the actors pose and declaim.

You need to use your setting for all it’s worth. Otherwise, it’s dead weight.

© 2007 Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan is the author of A Nail Through the Heart: A Novel (Published by William Morrow/An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers; July 2007; $24.95US/$31.50CAN; ISBN: 978-0-06-125580-9). Hallinan divides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand, where he has lived off and on for more than twenty years. As a principal in one of America’s top television consulting firms, he represented many Fortune 500 companies and pioneered new methods of making television programming accessible to teachers. He has also taught writing for many years. A Nail Through the Heart is his seventh novel.

For more information, please visit www.timothyhallinan.com

Lieutenant John Driscoll has just buried his wife who was in a deep coma for several years, after a drunk driving accident took the life of his daughter. He isn’t given any time to grieve before the mayor assigns him a new case. Tourists are turning up dead in New York City tourist attractions, prominently displayed for everyone to see. It’s up to Driscoll and his team to find out who is killing these people and why.

It doesn’t take them or the reader long to learn the identities of these killers and their motive. These are the only unique factors in an otherwise predictable story. I’ve read too many serial killer novels and have become jaded with their plots. Nevertheless, I found myself engrossed and feeling almost sympathetic for the killers. I liked the way O’Callaghan humanized the cops, especially Margaret Aligante, who was the most affected by this case because of her background. Recommended.